


please color inside the lines

by harcourt



Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Humor, M/M, Man Out of Time, Ridiculous, Steve goes to school, i think, something like this was bound to happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:06:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harcourt/pseuds/harcourt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve discovers Clint's misused drawing talent, so when he decides to go back to school and needs a friend to help him settle into the Real World, he asks Clint to go with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	please color inside the lines

It all started--sort of--when Steve ate some cold spaghetti he thought had been forgotten and was greeted the next time he raided the fridge in the middle of the night by a scribbled semblance of Thor, his rectangular eyebrows flat across his face as if they didn't know whether to tilt inward for anger or outward for sadness, and his mouth a frowny curve. The single line used to indicate it was running a little from the combination of condensation and non-water-proof ink. "WHAT FIEND HAST TAKENETH MY SPAGHETTI" floated above the sad-mad face in drawn, boxy letters, with no punctuation to clarify whether it was a question or an outraged exclamation.

Steve found a ballpoint and scribbled on the lower corner of it, "I'm really sorry. I thought no one wanted it anymore. --Steve."

There was no response from doodle-Thor. Eventually the paper got soggy and the rest of the drawing ran and Natasha threw it out.

And Steve thought no more of it until he found a post-it with a drawing of himself on it, grumpy-faced, his arms waving with no clear indication of elbows and a speech bubble coming out of his mouth that was filled with nothing but stars over a background of stripes. It felt really sarcastic. Maybe a bit mean, and Steve frowned at it for a while before deciding to put a positive spin on it. He wrote "STEVE'S SANDWICH" over the stars in the bubble and used it to mark the tupperware box in the fridge that had most of a meatball subway in it, slated for a midnight snack.

And of course, when he came back for it, someone had eaten it and scribbled over his note in felt-tip "Thanks, Steve!" It was _definitely_ mean. He couldn't tell if the doodler and the food thief were one and the same, but he was writing Thor off as being either. First of all, Thor didn't really do Americana-based sarcasm, and second, Thor wouldn't have written _thanks_ when he could have fit in _I wish to express my gratitude for this feast_.

For a while he suspected Tony, because Tony could draw schematics, so why not other things, but then he found a receipt with a picture of Tony looking like a wilted plant on the back of it, half propped on a rectangle that might be a table, with his eyes little dashes to indicate they were closed, and gratuitously triumphant letters proclaiming "I HAVE INVENTED A SOURCE OF INFINITE ENERGY" surrounded by little Zs.

Tony might have fit the sarcasm, but self-deprecation wasn't really his style, so Steve wrote him off, too and when he turned the receipt over, it was for a ladies' coat. Somehow Natasha seemed an unlikely culprit, so he dismissed the receipt as being conveniently found paper and no more.

Until he found a neat guide taped to the edge of his computer screen--which he kept in the common area so he could call out questions to any of the others who might be around--with little drawings of the screen symbols and helpful annotations declaring things such as "This is the button for the internet," and "NEVER click this," and "email", "not email". 

It was only vaguely informative, and Steve wondered if he should appreciate the thought, because he wasn't sure whether the thought was to help him or to make fun of him. But the notes were hand-written this time instead of cartoon letters, and the hand writing was very obviously Clint's slightly messy scrawl. Steve considered it with a frown, then changed his expression when he realized he probably looked exactly like doodle-Steve. Who was still in the fridge, being used now to label a pot of Bruce's split pea soup as "getting old--use or freeze."

He should have guessed it was Clint. Clint with the hand-eye coordination and the visual memory and the weird commentary. Once he'd ruled out Tony, and had paper clearly taken from Natasha, he really should have figured it out right away. 

"Thanks, Clint," he wrote on the guide to the computering buttons.

He got a smiley-face exclamation-mark in response.

Steve kept collecting the doodles. They weren't a constant thing, and not really aimed at anyone, most of the time. Clint scribbled them when missions were weird, but not bad, or sometimes if someone annoyed him, or if he was up late by himself. Sometimes, if he was fighting with Tony, Steve found little doodled sad-face frowny Hawkeyes in the margins of the newspaper, which he thought was endearingly unexpected, considering it was Clint.

Clint had probably been doing it the whole time, and he'd never noticed, drawn as they were on whatever scraps of paper happened to be around when Clint's hands needed something to do, and as ridiculous as his doodles were, they weren't half bad.

And that was why, when Steve decided to go back to school and Bruce suggested one of them go with him, at least for a while, so he wouldn't be alone in the modern-era surrounded by modern-era youth and dealing with modern-era higher learning and modern-era popular culture, he asked Clint.

Clint objected. Not to helping Steve, but to math. And English. And history. And the entire general education requirement. He looked really troubled by the prospect, though Steve suspected mostly at the thought of sitting still and being talked at, instead of _doing_.

"It's one semester," Steve told him, "I'll take all art classes and it's only part-time. By next semester I should have my bearings. And you don't have to be in all of them. Just one or two."

"I still think you should take Bruce," Clint said, "He's good at school."

Bruce would hate it, and being surrounded by people and noise might have very foreseeable consequences. Tony might like it, might even not mind the classes Steve had chosen, but Tony was so busy. Natasha might be alright, but Steve had the feeling she would take the whole thing too seriously. Take being graded too personally, even though she would mostly be there to coach Steve on modern life, and Thor was right out for obvious reasons.

"Oh, fine," Clint said with a sigh, "Because of our friendship, I will come along and draw naked women with you." Steve wasn't sure if he was joking, or if he really thought it was a hardship. He _was_ with Tony after all, and that sigh sounded really heartfelt.

"I'm sure it won't _all_ be women," he said, just in case.

It turned out to not matter what the model was, because Clint barely paid attention to the class. Which was how he ended up on the second day pulling out a regular yellow number two pencil he'd probably pinched from the lab last-minute. 

"Shit," he hissed at Steve, "everyone has _stuff_. I _told_ you this was a bad idea. Everyone is going to think I'm _stupid_." He looked really accusing and it made Steve feel really guilty, so he loaned Clint a few pieces of charcoal and half his kneaded eraser.

Despite worrying about being seen as the class dunce, Clint mostly spent the time drawing what he felt like anyway, which was mostly the same sort of stuff Steve had found around the tower, just bigger, messier and more easily smudged. 

Clint had no idea how to handle the media. He got it everywhere. By the time they got back to the tower, he had smudges on his face and arms and streaks of charcoal dust all over his clothing. He looked like someone had thrown him down a coal chute. "Everyone thinks I'm an idiot," he announced, "I hate school," and Steve tried very hard to remember that Clint was doing this out of friendship and bit back the lecture about listening and preparation, up to and including bringing your own equipment.

It quickly became apparent that even though Clint had talent--maybe more than Steve, which was annoying--he either wasn't interested, or just didn't want to make that much effort, because all he did during their fourth class was draw a jelly-joint-limbed version of Natasha saying "cabbages cabbages", and it must have referenced something that had happened once because when he tacked it to the fridge with magnets, Natasha tore it down in short order and crumpled it into the wastebasket.

"I think your arms are getting better," Tony said, "They have more wiggle."

Clint said, "'I'm trying to express myself through the anatomy of the wiggle," and gave Tony a look that might have been a leer if he hadn't been trying so hard to look deadpan.

"This wasn't the assignment," Steve complained. He didn't like that Clint was not only not taking it seriously, he was turning the whole thing into a joke. Steve worked really hard. Steve _cared_. Steve even cared about expressing himself through the placement of anatomy, but now he couldn't say so because Tony was cracking up every time Clint said "anatomical position" in a fake snooty voice with one eyebrow raised.

Steve loved Clint, and he appreciated what Clint was doing for him, but he also kind of wanted to smack Clint. More than kind of. "Anatomical position" didn't even _mean_ anything.

"It's called _a pose_ ," he snapped, and left. His face probably looked exactly like doodle-Steve. He imagined all those indignant, self-righteous stars behind his words, and winced, but he wasn't going to take it back. Clint _was_ stupid, or at least he was acting that way intentionally. Steve didn't even care that he could feel the eyes of the team on him as he stepped into the elevator.

He spent the next day wandering the city with his sketchbook, but it wasn't any fun. He felt like the whole thing was silly, even though he knew he was taking the team's goofing way too personally. They were just acting that way because _Clint_ was silly and jokey and did silly jokey stuff, but he couldn't shake the feeling and ended up in the park angrily feeding bits of soft pretzels to the pigeons until it got dark and chilly out.

Clint seemed to either be annoyed that Steve was annoyed, or he felt bad that he'd caused Steve to have a tantrum because he spent the next session of holding Steve's hand in big-kid school doing what the class was supposed to do, bobbing his head vaguely to the beat of whatever he was listening to on his headphones. He looked really serious, head cocked to one side as he frowned and chewed his lip and gave his paper critical, wrinkled-nose looks. Steve smiled and left him alone.

But by the third class where Clint acted engaged--dabbing his finger at the paper and stepping back from his work to tap consideringly at his chin, Steve got suspicious and wandered over to look.

"That's not the pose, Clint," he hissed, horrified. 

It wasn't even the model, but somehow no one who wandered past checking up on each others' work ever said anything. If they paused too long, Clint gave them a little thumbs up and a toothy grin and Steve wished he'd worked just a little bit harder at pretending to not know Clint, the way they'd been supposed to do to maintain cover.

Clint wasn't drawing an artistic nude. Clint was drawing _obscenity_. And it wasn't that Steve was opposed, necessarily, but there was a _time_ and a _place_ for those sorts of things.

"I'm not even a real student," Clint said that night, a little testily, as he tacked his hand-drawn pornography to the refrigerator with the same colorful magnets he'd used to tack up cabbages-cabbages-Natasha.

"Well _I_ think it's beautiful," Tony said, and Clint turned to give him his best charming smooth-as-spies grin, "I'm going to frame it. And hang it in my boardroom." 

"It's smudgy," Steve pointed out, maybe a bit petty and meanly, but Tony waved the concern away.

"Once you frame it, everything is art," he said, and Steve frowned. Because it really wasn't. 

"Pepper won't ever let you," Bruce put in, in a gentle tone that Steve thought was for his benefit, to keep the whole thing from devolving into side taking, as things between Steve and Tony and sometimes Steve and Clint had a tendency to do.

Tony cast a regretful look back towards the fridge and sighed. "Pep has no taste," he said, but in a sad helpless way that meant he had no power to fight her.

Clint said, "Never mind. There's more where that came from," and wiggled an eyebrow at Bruce, for no reason that Steve could see. Bruce didn't even look _interested_ in the picture, apart from how it was causing a mild Steve-Tony standoff.

"I'll hang them _all_ in my boardroom," Tony declared, even though they knew he wouldn't.

But after that Clint stuck to the pose _and_ the model, and worked without making all the faces and doing all the head tilting. He had a little concentration frown, but that was about it. Steve didn't know what to make of it, or what had caused it, but when they were walking home after Clint had tried and failed to make Steve join a frisbee game that had broken out on the lawn--which was really just a scrap of park--Clint said, "So what are you getting? A plus plus pluses?"

Steve was scoring solid Bs. A few As. He said, "There's no such thing as A plus plus plus. I'm pretty sure a regular A is the limit after maybe third grade."

"I keep waiting for someone to give me a note to take home," Clint said, with a grin and a little laugh, "about how I'm gonna be held back. And I'm not even a real student."

Steve was pretty sure college didn't work like that, but the kids playing frisbee had looked so young and irresponsible, and the standards for when one was expected to show adult behavior seemed to have changed so much. Maybe they _did_ need to have notes sent home.

"Don't be so snotty," Clint said, the next time he failed to get Steve involved in student silliness, "it's just baseball. Why are you being like this?"

It was only a rough approximation of baseball, with no fielding and no teams. Mostly just kids taking turns at bat, then laughing and hooting when someone made the hit and they had to go chase the ball across the lawn. 

"Kids," Clint echoed, with a smile and a wry expression that he'd clearly picked up from Tony.

"Kids," Steve insisted, then pointed out, "I'm over ninety years old."

Clint said, "Uh-huh," and allowed it, but he made Steve get coffee with him and hang out to watch the game. Steve leaned against the low wall Clint had hopped up on, setting his drawing board--with it's clipped on pad of paper--against his legs.

"I'm not sure they even know how to play baseball," Steve commented, when a girl in shorts too short for the weather tackled a runner and they both went down with a combined whoop. Clint laughed, and popped the plastic cover off his coffee to chug the remainder, then pressed it back on so he could throw the whole thing towards a garbage bin. It clattered as it went in, and Steve tossed his own more carefully after.

A day later he found another doodle-Steve, in the blank area of a half-page newspaper ad, this time with patriotic lettering--thick blocks with stars and stripes--reading, "GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN, YOU DAMN KIDS," and "THIS IS NOT THE BASEBALL OF CENTENARIANS."

He frowned at it so long that Tony came over and peered over his shoulder, then snorted. "Kids," he said, as if in sympathetic disgust, and patted Steve on the shoulder. Steve closed the paper and folded it in half. Tossed it towards the middle of the table.

"It's not that," he said, "it's just." They weren't all that young. A good number of them were about Steve's age--his functional age, although there were a couple of much older students as well--and the horsing around on the lawn didn't even look that different from their own horsing around after training sessions.

"Is Clint being too cool for school and ditching you for the popular kids' table? You want me to beat him about the head until he remembers he's supposed to be helping you?"

"Clint's not that good at school, either," Steve pointed out, and grinned, "I think he's failing." 

"Well. It's not like he's a real student," Tony said.

Clint _could_ be a real student, though. If he applied himself. He was already pretty good at all the stuff that Steve was bad at, like fostering a coffee addiction, crabbing about the sandwiches in the cafeteria and pretending to have normal-people aim during a session of pick-up ball that Steve wouldn't join. 

Instead, he used up more than half of Steve's charcoal because he never had his own--Steve let it go, because he figured he owed Clint at least that--mounted work crooked, and couldn't identify why or why not something was successful and half of his papers were covered with porn he presented to Tony when they got home, and the other half with mocking doodle-people, interspersed only occasionally with actual work.

"To be fair," Bruce said, when Steve glared at the latest refrigerator display, "His nudes are getting pretty good."

"That wasn't the pose," Steve grumbled.

"God," Natasha said, surveying the piece coolly, "I'd hope not."

"What if we could put them all together and made a flip book," Tony suggested, from across the room. 

The paper was too big and too floppy for a flip book. Steve didn't mention it. 

After the next class, Clint made him get coffee and watch more not-sports while they sat on the wall. "I don't think you really need me," he said, removing the lid again, but this time so he could blow on the coffee, "You look like you're doing fine. No one's picking on you. No one's taking your lunch money or shoving you into lockers."

It was true, but Steve didn't really want to be left alone yet because just that morning he'd been accused of having _Grampa taste in music_ , but no one had clarified what he was _supposed_ to like. "It's only a few more weeks," Steve said, and tried to sound casual instead of desperate while he sipped his coffee. It was getting cold out. The not-sports on the lawn had a trend towards versions of football these days. A bit of soccer.

"I got a note," Clint offered, and dug through his coat pocket for it. He handed Steve a crumpled, folded paper. 

Steve opened it up and read, "You are missing a number of assignments," and well. Clint _was_. "You care? I thought you weren't a real student?" Steve asked. Clint shrugged.

"I _told_ you you should have picked Bruce."

Steve didn't think Bruce would really be any better at explaining modern life than Clint was. Bruce definitely wouldn't make Steve come off like an awkward guy who had at least one mostly-normal friend. If he'd taken Bruce the two of them would have huddled together in a lump of miserable awkwardness and fear of creating a Hulk incident.

When they got home, Clint didn't tack anything to the fridge, and when Tony demanded, "Where is my offering of porn, Barton?" Clint just threw his bag onto the counter and glared at him.

"I'm failing a class called _introduction_ ," he announced solemnly, and stormed out.

"What the fuck is with him?" Tony asked Steve, kind of accusingly. His tone had gone from cheerful entitlement to hurt snippiness.

"He's failing a class called 'introduction'?" Bruce offered, and gestured to the fridge. "I guess the gallery is bare tonight, Cap."

Steve felt kind of bad about usurping the fridge space when Clint was upset, but even Tony cocked him an expectant look, so Steve pulled out a sheet of paper and stuck it up. Natasha whistled.

"Finally, something that's not going to put me off cooking," she said, which Steve didn't think was very high praise, but considering what had _been_ adorning the fridge, it was an understandable reaction.

"Well well, Mr. Talent," Tony said, and leaned against the counter to survey it. "Now _that_ Pepper would probably let me hang in the board room. Especially if you sign it _Captain America_."

"I'm signing it _Steve_ ," Steve said. He'd sign it _Steve Rogers_ , or _S Rogers_ , but he was supposed to be Stephen Markham at school, so he just left his last name off everything. If it was odd, nobody ever commented.

Clint put his nose to the grindstone for about two classes before he got bored and forgot to bring his tools again. "I have nothing in my bag except Bruce's stupid pencils and a mini crossbow," he hissed, "If I shoot her in the neck, maybe I can make a break for it."

Steve considered. "The model or the teacher?"

"I have more than one arrow."

Steve didn't bother to ask why. Or where he'd gone that had required scaled-down weaponry and pencils, but nothing else. Instead he handed Clint a charcoal pencil and five sheets of paper from his sketchbook. "This is why you're failing, you know," he whispered.

Clint whispered back, "I'm dating a guy who had an advanced degree by three, and I'm failing a class called _introduction_." He didn't say it like he was bothered by it, but he covered at least one of the sheets with dopey looking Hawkeyes, then jammed it into his bag before anyone else could see.

"It's called _introduction to the figure_. Do you even know what the class _is_?"

"I'm not a real student," Clint whispered, and put on his headphones. 

Steve wondered about the contents of Clint's bag a moment longer--weapons, stationary and music, now--then shrugged and turned his eyes to the model.

Two days later a Captain-A-plus doodle showed up on the back of Steve's drawing board in marker and he had to put a sticker over it in the interest of maintaining cover. 

"You should use an Iron Man sticker," Tony said, "It would totally throw the hounds off your trail."

"If by hounds you mean art student undergrads," Bruce put in, "I somehow doubt their detective work is really all that solid."

Steve smoothed the sticker down. He wasn't sure if the drawing was meant to be funny or mean, which was the way a lot of Clint's drawings seemed to go a lot of the time. The little plus sign floating next to the A on the little figure's forehead had an edge to it that Steve wasn't sure he was imagining or not. "I don't think you can get an A plus in college," Steve said, _again_ , and added another sticker further away so it wouldn't look so much like a cover-up job.

Clint might have been disheartened by the grades his lack of doing any work was resulting in, but he got Steve involved in a water balloon fight by beaning him from behind while Steve yelled about his work getting ruined and how many hours he had spent shading and how it was all on paper and paper got soggy and.

"Loosen up, A-plus," Clint said, when Steve hugged his art folder protectively to his chest, "Come _on_ , Steve. How can I leave you on your own if you don't learn how to play with others?"

So Steve did it, even though it was cold and _November_ , but mostly to make Clint feel better.

No one was careful anymore about all the things Steve had been taught to watch out for. Like ruining clothes because there was no money for new ones and mending took time and washing didn't always clear stains. He imagined what his mother would have done if he'd come home soaked in near-winter, covered in mud and grass stains, with ruined books no less.

"You should have played frisbee, then," was Clint's unrepentant response, when Steve complained while throwing his clothing into a sodden heap to be thrown into the wash after dinner. "What's the point if you don't want to get to know anybody?"

And that was the problem, really. There was no _point_ in getting to know anybody, when they couldn't get to know _Steve_. It wouldn't be like Tony's friendship with Rhodey or Pepper, or Thor's with Jane and Darcy and even Eric Selvig, who weren't Avengers, but who they didn't need to hide things from. Even with Coulson gone, Clint and Natasha had friends from SHIELD--Sitwell and Morse and a handful of others that they went out with and afterwards came home rowdy and bickering. Bruce was maybe the one who could most understand, but even Bruce didn't have a history that went _I was fighting the Nazis when_.

"Say you were in a coma, and can't remember," Tony advised, like the answer to having to lie was to make up more lies, "It's not entirely false."

"It's a lot false," Steve said, "And it doesn't explain why I don't know _things_. What the hell is a lawn dart, by the way?"

"Oh my god," Tony said, "Make sure Clint is on _your_ team."

"We're not going to play it," Steve said, "but apparently it's really funny that we might."

"It's a similar concept to horseshoes," Tony said. 

Clint snorted, and over the next few days Steve found occasional post-its, a scrap of notepad paper and a coaster with doodles of Tony proclaiming various things to be similar in concept to other, much more deadly things. "SIMILAR IN CONCEPT TO A LASER" found it's way to the microwave and stayed stuck there for almost a week before it was replaced with, "Take out the trash, Romanov, goddamn it," which was replaced with, "That is a man job. I'll do the dishes," but no one did either and it was Bruce who eventually caved and did both.

Class was let out for a week of mid-semester break, even though it was really much closer to the end of the term than the middle, and Steve used the time to get started on his final project, laying out tinted papers and planning each piece along with the others, like any battle plan, then set to work blocking out basic forms and major shadow areas.

Clint spent the time helping Tony and Bruce blow things up in the lab, not that they needed the assistance, and sometimes offering Steve helpful commentary. Natasha offered to pose, but reminded Steve to obscure her face, so he set her up with dramatic back-lighting but posed her casually in the living room window in her everyday clothes. It made her look friendly and mysterious at the same time, and she nodded approvingly as he scrawled _Steve_ at the bottom of the page. Even after adding a flourished underline, the signature looked somehow inadequate.

"Tell everyone she's your girlfriend," Clint advised, because the class could be nosy about everyone else's drawings and tended to ask too many questions for Steve's comfort, "Then you'll have _tons_ of friends next semester." He didn't add _when you're all alone and not playing frisbee_. "Just hint that she has a lot of single friends."

"Bruce and Thor might not be what the freshman brigade expect," Tony put in, "But I'm sure once they get to know them, they'll hit it off."

Steve tried to ignore them. He wasn't going to bring Natasha into it, or the rest of the team. The last thing he needed was more Avenger heckling in his real-world life and besides. He wasn't even supposed to acknowledge knowing _Clint_ outside of class, and they had completely failed at maintaining that subterfuge, mostly because Clint kept borrowing his stuff and Steve had to keep asking what was going on when the class started dropping names and references.

Break ended just as Steve's organized class work schedule did, and he was pleased that he'd planned his time so perfectly. Clint frowned at him and made a few halfhearted attempts to pretend to care about keeping up the appearance of being a fellow student, but ended up scribbling a "CAPTAIN AMERICA WANTS TO EDUCATE YOU" doodle in the corner of his paper, then abandoning the whole thing.

"You know I'm not a real student," he told Tony, and Tony said, "Yeah, yeah. I'm not a real billionaire."

"Oh god. Why am I dating you then?" Clint grouched.

Tony made smug faces at him and said, "I think you know why, Barton," and Steve decided to ignore them before they got out of hand and lewd. He put his work neatly into a folder and left.

As expected, Steve got a B-plus, not an A as Clint kept accusing him of because that was reserved for truly extraordinary work. Clint got a note that said he had a period of grace time, and to get his work in by the end of the last class--the instructor's, not theirs. They were effectively done--or he would fail abysmally. Clint tacked the note to the fridge.

"Eat your heart out MIT," he told Tony.

"I failed a class once," Tony said, nostalgically and not really like he was making an attempt to be supportive, "but I think only on a technicality because I blew up a lab."

"Losers," Natasha declared, "I've always passed everything," and toasted Steve with a glass of juice. Steve noticed that she didn't specify _class_ or _school_ and decided he really didn't want to know. The things Natasha might have been tested on were likely to put a damper on his good-final-grade day. He had the feeling that if she hadn't passed, she wouldn't even _be there_ to brag about it.

"Well," Clint said, standing back and eying the tacked-up note with satisfaction, like it was a particularly successful piece of work, "Three more days and I'm officially a drop-out. Again." 

"That's an achievement," Tony said, "since you're not even a real student," and gave him a congratulatory pat on the back.

The whole thing really bothered Steve. He didn't really approve of the team supporting Clint's determination to fail, even at being a fake student and he felt guilty that Clint had gone out of his way to get Steve involved in basketball, unseasonal water balloon fights, and the hypothetical lawn darts game that had never materialized, and had generally let Steve come off as the kind, competent friend of a guy who forgot his paper most of the time, and in return he had let Clint fail an introductory level class. 

_Hulk_ should have been able to pass an introductory level class.

So when Steve went to hand in other work--work for a Clint-less class--he also stopped by the final meeting of a different section of _introduction to the figure_ and handed over a tidy journal in which he'd fastened all the less Avenger-y of the doodles he'd collected to fulfill the sketchbook requirement and, more embarrassingly, a folder that was half full of the but-for-Pepper-I'd-hang-it-in-my-boardroom drawings.

Then he spun some lie about Clint being sick to explain why he wasn't bringing it himself and cited water balloons, even though no one had been at that game since the temperature had really dropped. But the instructor rolled her eyes like it was something she was used to, and said, "It's very kind of you to drop this off, Stephen," and Steve shrugged because it wasn't like he could tell her the whole story.

It wasn't like he could tell anyone the real story, but when he ran into a girl from the class who was also dropping off late work they ended up getting coffee and sitting on Clint's wall by the lawn, and coordinating class schedules for the next semester because she thought Steve's drawings were _wonderful_ and Steve thought she wasn't likely to make fun of him when he didn't know things.

"Grow up abroad, did you?" she asked, when he missed a joke and he twitched.

"Something like that." It was better than Tony's _I've been in a coma_ dramatics, even if in a way it was less true.

Clint's incomplete was upped to a C, and he printed the page out and handed it to Steve with a weird kind of formality and said, "I'm still dropping out."

"I know."

"It's time for you to fly, Nemo."

Steve was pretty sure Nemo was a fish, but he let it go, just in case he was wrong. Now that he knew a couple of people and had a few months of experience under his belt, he'd be fine. Or at least not as lost, and he needed a non-Avengers life, as much as Clint--if he ever decided on pursuing non-SHIELD related skills--needed to choose for himself what he wanted to do. Steve couldn't really selfishly drag him or any other Avenger--he'd briefly considered replacing him with Natasha, even with her frightening _I never fail_ determination--around like a security blanket.

He turned Clint's printed out grade sheet a little and drew a fair imitation of doodle-Steve on the bottom of it, then didn't know how to caption it. Clint watched him think, then laughed and said, "Just sign it. Sign it CAPTAIN AMERICA," Steve could hear the all-caps in his voice. Or maybe it was because Clint's doodle-Steve always spoke in bold block letters.

He signed it _Steve Rogers_ and tacked it to the fridge.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Anatomical Position (please color inside the lines remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/865701) by [celeste9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9)
  * [Banner for harcourt's "please color inside the lines"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/877525) by [Neffie (originalneffie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/originalneffie/pseuds/Neffie)




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